The Book of Mirdad

Mikhail Naimy was born in Baskinta, a town in central Lebanon sitting high on the slope of majestic Mt Sannin and overlooking the Eastern Mediterranean. He was the third in a Greek Orthodox family of five brothers and one sister. His education took him from his village school, run by a Russian mission, to the Russian Teachers’ Institute in Nazareth, Palestine, then to the Theological Seminary in Poltava, Russia, and finally to the University of Washington, USA, where in 1916 he obtained degrees in Liberal Arts and Law. In the same year he moved to New York, where he founded, with his close friend, Kahlil Gibran, a dynamic movement for the rejuvenation of Arabic literature.
After Gibran’s death and after twenty years of continuous life in America, interrupted by only one year of service (1917–1918), as a soldier in the American Army in France, Naimy returned to his picturesque Baskinta in Lebanon, where he dedicated himself entirely, until his death in 1988, to contemplation and writing on the deeper meaning of life. His thirty-one works are acclaimed as classics across the entire Arabic-speaking world and in many other languages. To the English-speaking world, Naimy is known mainly through The Book of Mirdad, which is now also available in most European languages. Other works in English by Naimy are: Memoirs of a Vagrant Soul, or Pitted Face, Till We Meet and his biography of Kahlil Gibran, who was for sixteen years his intimate friend and companion in New York